How unfortunate that a person today found it impossible to discern who exactly these times required them to become! We still could not figure out which of the divine commandments we must violate. Conscience was becoming increasingly obsolete. While we heard constantly about the Gita and the Tirukkural, it seemed that the secret to the success of those who carried these texts around in their hands lay precisely in the fact that they knew when to violate them discreetly. They were in the grips of the fear that they would be ruined if they shut their eyes and obeyed anything with total and complete faith. How could ordinary people be saved by creeds that were not foolproof? Such creeds might be good enough for saints, but then saints had no need for creeds in the first place. It was also not clear how anyone could trust anything without guarantees. It had been ages since it was decreed that we must speak the truth, but we had still not determined in what circumstances we were allowed to lie. We needed to know urgently when it was acceptable to cheat someone and when, even if only as an exception to the rule, it was permissible to covet another man’s wife. It seemed we could no longer bear the torments of the conscience that we could neither follow nor violate without compunction.

An international organization had built a children’s playground within the park. Children could play on the slide and the seesaw, they could swing on the trapeze rings, they could turn somersaults. They came to play here in the evenings. By the time children from the convent school went home, had coffee and snacks, changed into their play clothes, and headed to the park carrying chocolates to munch later, the poor kids from the east side of town occupied everything in the playground. Now, the fathers of some of the convent-school kids were members of that international organization. So the convent kids were livid at the other kids who wouldn’t even let them enjoy the things they believed were rightfully theirs. Daweed, the playground attendant, shared their feelings, but there was nothing much he could do. Once, when he attempted to expel the east-side street kids on the charge that they were damaging the facilities in the playground—which was only half true—a crowd rushed from the lawn and conducted a heated public meeting. Daweed was lucky to escape without a beating that day.